Making Paint with Fruit and Veggies!

supplies — Supplies for painting with veggies and fruit.

No paint at home? No problem! You can make dyes and paint at home using vegetable scraps and fruit. In one of my previous videos, Drawing with Glue, I showed you how to use condiments like turmeric, paprika and cinnamon as pigments, today we’ll be using food!

** Be sure to have help from a grownup because there is some boiling water involved**

In today’s video available at these links – on FB and Instagram you’ll see how you can use carrot, beet, lemon and blackberry dyes to make a bubble painting, straw painting and a funky texture painting.

I have included the link to download a wonderful picture tutorial from http://meyamo.com/ that I followed to make these dyes.

I didn’t have any powdered sugar, so I left that out. This gave me a paint that is very close to watercolor and I was able to use the same techniques I use with watercolor paint.

Supplies –

Orange carrots, purple carrot, frozen beets, blackberries and lemon
Watercolor paper – you will need sturdy paper. If you don’t have card stock or watercolor paper, I suggest gluing a few pages of copy paper together or gluing copy paper to a piece of cardboard. This will prevent the paint from soaking into the paper completely.
Paintbrush – I also used a make up sponge!
Paper towel or napkin
Straw

Steps –

Click on this link and follow the directions to make your dyes/paints – Meyamo_Handmade_Fruit and Vegetable_Paints

This is a great use for any older fruits and vegetable scraps you have. You can also use any jars or plastic containers you’ve been saving or have in the recycling pile to store your paint for future paintings.

The concentration of color depends on how much water is added to the fruit and vegetables. Although the color may be very light at first, it does dry darker and once your first layer of paint is dry you can add more to make your color more vibrant.

Make the straw painting by dropping puddles of paint on the paper with a brush or spoon and blowing the paint around, producing some really abstract designs.

Adding salt to the wet paint will give you an interesting texture. See how the texture changes by adding more or less. Once dry, brush or tap off the salt and see what your texture looks like.

If you don’t have any paintbrushes, you can also use a cotton ball or a make up sponge! This sponge gave me 3 sides to get interesting prints from.

Sponge prints using carrot and beet paint

As you can see, there are many ways to experiment with your natural dyes. What other kind of natural paint has been used throughout history?

Here are some links to more resources about that –

Famous Cave Paintings

Colorful History of Paint

Bugs, Snails & Precious Stones

Tune in on FB and Instagram on Saturday when I’ll be reading “The Rainbow Goblins” and sharing art techniques using simple tools.

Thanks for visiting and keep creating!

Patty

Shape Collage!

Hello! today’s project is super simple but can be expanded and transformed into anything you like! Collage is an art technique that almost everyone has used at some point. It lends itself to so many possibilities and can be created with just about any materials you have on hand.

As always you can see the full video project at Art Out of Anything on Facebook and Instagram. Brand new project videos on Tuesday and Thursday every week.

For today’s project I chose the following supplies –

Paper – all kinds to tear up like magazines, construction paper, tissue paper, copy paper etc.
Glue stick
Pencil and/or marker
Scissor
Paper to draw my shape on and as the canvas for your collage

STEPS –

Choose shape you would like to fill. I chose a heart but also drew a silhouette of a cat. You can also use coloring book pages or print out coloring pages or line drawings and use those as your shape guide.
Tear the collage paper into small pieces to fit your shape. Optional – you can also cut your paper into pieces with scissors. Tearing is also a really good fine motor skill to practice.
Start gluing your pieces to the inside of your shape as if you were coloring. You can overlap pieces or place them next to each other. You can also leave space in between pieces. Try all different ways to fill in your shape.

Once completed, add one coat of glue to the entire surface of your collage to glue down any loose edges. Here is my completed heart shape collage which I glued onto a page from a magazine, cut around it, then glued onto another full magazine page to make a border. The red page was a perfume ad so the heart smells pretty too!

Of course you can also come up with your own theme for a collage! Here are some examples of collages my students made that describe their favorite place –

You can also make a collage using only shades of the same color, only faces and more. Challenge yourself to create a collage landscape using only pictures, like they did in the examples above of their favorite place. What picture do you think they used to represent the sand? Hint – it’s an advertisement for flooring.

Picasso and Braque were the first to use collage they way we recognize it, in their work. Here’s a link to a fantastic article, with photos of amazing collage work by famous artists My Modern Met – Collage Art

This is a digital shape collage maker that uses your own photos – Shape Collage download

It’s also an app for Android and IPhones.

Collage is an art form that I use in my personal work all the time. I even make collage jewelry with scraps of anything I have on hand –

I hope you find wild and wonderful things to make collages of!

Please contact patty @eljaiekart@gmail.com for remote learning workshops and professional development bookings.

Thanks for visiting and keep creating,

Patty

Spiders, Bugs and Insects! Oh my!

Hello, hello!

Today’s Story Time Read Aloud is Miss Spider’s Wedding by David Kirk. You can see the video read aloud and video tutorial at Art Out of Anything on FB and Instagram.

I love insects. I love reading about them, drawing them and creating mashed up illustrations of insects and other animals! David Kirk’s stunning paintings that illustrate Miss Spider’s Wedding, remind us how beautiful insects are and also how beautiful a little feeling called love is too.

When I decided to make insects for this project, I didn’t have any clay or dough and I thought maybe other people might not have any either. SO, I have made some simple insects using paper, tape, straws, shish kabob sticks, paint and glue. You can also use chopsticks and Q-Tips or pencils.

Below you will find links to sites that show you how to make your own dough at home, learn more about insects and some free downloadable templates for inspiration.

Steps –

Wings – I am sure you have probably seen this classic symmetry activity. It’s the easiest and prettiest way to get pairs of wings for your insect.

fold a piece of paper in half
place paint, directly from bottle or tube, near the center crease of the paper.
add as many colors as you like but make sure you are using small amounts of paint. You don’t want the paint to leak out!
once you have all the paint colors you like, close the paper on the crease so it’s folded again
begin spreading out the paint in between the two halves of the paper.

You can see the paint faintly through the paper and can shape the wings by using your hands and spreading the paint. Open your paper and you have your wings!

In my project, I used an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of copy paper and once dry, was able to cut out 3 pairs of wings.

I also made a “bee” using paper and tape. It’s easy to mold paper into shapes and hold together using tape. You can watch me complete that little bee on the video.

Science Connection – Insects are some of the most interesting species on the planet. Here are some links to learn about the difference between insects, bugs and more –

Bug or Insect? , Facts About Bugs and Insects , Parts of an Insect, 14 of the World’s Wildest Insects

FREE downloadable templates – Beetle , Spider , Ladybug

Play dough and clay recipes – Recipe #1 , Recipe #2 , No cook Recipe #3

Here are some amazing insects that some of my students made using Model Magic, a template and cardboard.